Interesting reflecting on this as an MIT student subject to this overhead :) I have an NSF fellowship starting next year and was surprised to find it only covers ~half of my support, despite paying out 48k / year.
Conversation
It's not obvious to me that that's a terrible ratio. I benefit greatly from having an advisor / department, getting to take classes, etc. (Also, can't get NSF funding in the first place w/o legibility of university! The government is paying me to explore things, exciting!)
1
3
OTOH, it can feel slightly much sometimes. This year I'm sitting at home hacking on stuff on my laptop (no special nuclear reactors or anything), and the overhead is pretty steep
1
5
Right, I imagine e.g. mathematicians might feel particularly sore about this.
1
4
Yeah, although maybe mathematicians, being further from immediate applications than CS, are glad to have any funding at all? Idk.
I suspect that the time wasted applying for grants (even successful ones!) may be even more painful than the spending overhead factor...
1
2
Curious how you think about "finding a campus" w/ indie funding?
Personally I get tons of value from Twitter / Internet spaces, but also find more rigid institutional structure helpful -- a committed advisor, peer groups, milestones... all help me grow and also just keep going
1
9
I think about it a lot. I've written up some straw proposals. None of them is good. I don't know how to do it!
Among many challenging issues: my 0.7x-CAREER-level crowdfunded "grant" wouldn't even cover my mortgage if I paid typical F&A rates.
2
4
I wonder about cheapest parts to unbundle...
I wonder how much of the value of a "campus" is just drawing stronger lines between communities, even if slightly arbitrary.
I find it quite useful being nudged towards repeated interactions w/ the same small-ish group of people
2
4
I've found online communities to be larger, more open and nebulous... which is of course their strength.
Maybe could work to just randomly assign smaller groups of people to collab more closely? Not entirely different from people randomly ending up at some university
1
2
I’ve never seen significant innovations happening in broad settings. I have observed plenty of cases in which innovation happens in small groups that communicate tightly within the group and loosely outside the group.
2
2
The largeness/openness/nebulosity are advantage,s but I agree with Tudor that it seems quite limited: hard to accumulate context, have sufficiently deep conversations, manage signal:noise, build trust…